Watched

Tobias Penn had been a junior clerk at Hollis and Crane for two years and eleven months, and in all that time nobody had ever come into the office and asked him a real question.

Then, at nine on Friday morning, two detectives walked in.

"Morning," said the taller one. He was tired around the eyes, in the way of a man who slept badly on principle, and he laid a cream-coloured business card on the counter like a card player laying down a hand. "I'm hoping you can help me with something. Is this yours?"

Tobias looked at the card. It was one of theirs. He knew it by the weight of the paper alone. He had ordered four hundred of them last spring, on Mr. Fenwick's instruction, in a very particular stock, and he had been told to give them to no one but Mr. Fenwick himself.

"That's ours," he said. His voice came out a little high. "Yes. It is."

"Good." The detective didn't smile. The one beside him, a dark, neat man with an easy face, was looking around the office with open interest, as though it were a museum. "Somebody handed that to a woman on Cuttler Boulevard in August. Very polite gentleman, good coat, gloves. Said he was a notary, tracing an estate. Asked if the shop was holding any property for people. Ring any bells?"

"Gloves," Tobias said.

"Gloves."

"We do estate searches." He heard himself say it, the way you hear yourself falling. "Lots of them. It's a large part of what we do. Sometimes we send someone out, quietly. To make inquiries. The families like discretion."

"What family?"

"That would be confidential."

"I was afraid of that." The detective glanced at the name plate on the counter. "You're Mr. Penn?"

"Yes."

"Do you happen to know who the gentleman was?"

"I'd have to ask," Tobias said. He was sweating. He could feel it, cold under his collar. "I only handle filings. I'm sorry. I could take your number."

The detective looked at him a long moment. It was not a hostile look. It was almost worse. It was the look of a man who had watched a great many people lie, and had learned to feel a little sorry for them.

"Tell you what," he said, and put a second card next to the first. "You ask. And if it turns out a man in a good coat has been going through dry cleaners' back rooms with a crowbar, maybe you call me."

"It wasn't a crowbar," Tobias said, before he could stop himself.

The room went very quiet.

"No," the detective said, gently. "I don't suppose it was."

He tapped the card, once, and went out. His partner followed, looking back over one shoulder at the door in the back wall of the office, the one everyone took for a supply closet. He looked at it for exactly a second too long.

Tobias stood there for a moment with his heart going like a rabbit's. Then a hand touched his elbow, very lightly, and he nearly went through the ceiling.

"That was quite well done," said Aldous Fenwick.

He had come out of the back without a sound. He always did. He was a mild, grey, forgettable man in his sixties, with a mild grey suit and a mild grey smile, the kind of man you passed in a hallway and could not, a minute later, have described to a police artist. He was looking at the two cards on the counter with polite interest, as though someone had left him a small unexpected gift.

"I said the wrong thing," Tobias whispered. "I said *crowbar*. I said..."

"You said what any honest boy would say. It's why you're so useful." Fenwick swept both cards into his palm. "I have a small errand for you this afternoon, Tobias. Isolde has decided the Table would like a pair of ordinary eyes on the district, and Dr. Voss suggested someone with your particular sensitivity. Nothing dangerous. You are simply to go for a walk in Kesting Row, and to look. And to remember what you see."

"Look at what?"

"A signature. She'll tell you more. You needn't speak to anyone. You needn't do anything at all." Fenwick patted his arm, twice. "Just be very, very ordinary. I have every faith in you."

Tobias swallowed. He'd always been a little bit like the Table's smallest instrument, sensitive to things the others couldn't feel, and quite unable to do anything with it. It was the only reason he'd been hired.

"What if it sees me?" he asked.

"Then it will think you are a boy on his lunch break," said Fenwick, kindly. "Which you are."

***

"Cuttler Boulevard," Eli said. "You know what I like about Cuttler Boulevard?"

"Nothing," said Nate.

"Nothing. Exactly. It's a street with the imagination of a parking lot." He pushed open the door of the laundromat. "Which makes it a perfect place to hide a crime."

It was one o'clock, and the laundromat smelled the way laundromats do, of hot lint and cheap soap, with a low warm hum of dryers turning behind the glass. Two women were folding sheets at the back. A kid was asleep on a plastic chair with his hood over his face. And behind the check cashing counter, with her reading glasses pushed up on her forehead and her cash box tucked under one arm, stood Mrs. Adeyemi, who took one look at Nate and went the colour of old paper.

"Detective."

"Mrs. Adeyemi. Sorry to bother you again. Just a couple of follow-up questions." He set the card on the counter. "The man with the gloves. Did he leave you a phone number besides this one?"

She didn't answer. She was looking past him, at the door.

"Mrs. Adeyemi?"

"You should come back," she said. Her voice had gone thin and dry. "You should come back another day."

"Is something wrong?"

The bell over the door jingled.

He knew before he turned. It was in the way her whole face closed, like a hand around a coin. He turned slowly, and a big man in a grey delivery jacket stood in the doorway, a plain canvas bag over one shoulder, a bunch of keys in his hand. Fifties. A heavy, pleasant face gone slightly soft around the chin. He looked at Nate, and at Eli, and at the two cards on the counter, and the pleasant face didn't change at all.

"Afternoon," said the big man, and nodded to Mrs. Adeyemi, like a neighbour. "I'll come back."

"No, please," said Mrs. Adeyemi. "It's the usual. It's ready."

She was already sliding an envelope across the counter, thick, brown, folded once. The big man took it without looking at it. He tucked it into the canvas bag. He said, "Thank you, Ade. Tell your daughter I asked after her," and touched two fingers to his forehead, and went out. The bell jingled behind him.

For a moment nobody in the laundromat moved. A dryer buzzed. The kid in the plastic chair stirred and settled.

"Well, that was cheerful," said Eli, very lightly.

"Who was that?" Nate asked.

"A customer." Mrs. Adeyemi had both hands flat on her cash box. "He picks up the checks. For a friend. Every second Friday. It's a favour."

"What friend?"

"I don't know."

"Ade."

"I *don't know,* Detective." She looked at him, and her eyes were bright and frightened and very steady. "I have a daughter. I have this shop. I have a cousin in Brampton who sends money home. I don't ask who the friend is. I don't want to know."

Nate stood there with a cold weight settling in his stomach. He had spent his whole first month in Millhaven learning not to look at a certain diner. He'd been ordered off it, in plain words, in an office with a printout of his own login on the desk. And here it was again, walking out of a laundromat in a delivery jacket, with its hand on a canvas bag.

"That man," he said quietly. "Did you ever see him at Jade Palace?"

Her face gave it away before her mouth did. It was only a flicker, and gone, but it was there.

"I don't know a Jade Palace," she said.

"Okay," said Nate.

"I don't."

"Okay. Thank you, Mrs. Adeyemi. I'll come back another day."

They went out into the flat bright afternoon. Cuttler Boulevard ran away from them, long and grey and almost empty, in both directions. Two doors down stood an apartment building, tired brick with a fire escape and a row of narrow balconies stacked up its face like drawers, and on the third floor, on the end, a plastic chair sat beside a dead potted plant. A small striped cat lay on the concrete floor in a patch of sun.

It lifted its head and looked down at him.

Something slid under Nate's ribs, warm and sudden, so strong he put out a hand and touched the wall. It was not a memory. It was not grief. It was like standing in front of a door at the end of a hallway and knowing, without a word from anyone, that somebody had just left the room.

"You good?" Eli said.

"Yeah." He took his hand off the brick. "Just a rough week."

"They're all rough weeks. That's the job." Eli was studying him with that quiet, sideways attention, and then his eyes followed Nate's up the face of the building. "You know that place?"

"I canvassed it, a month ago. Nobody home."

"Nobody home." Eli whistled softly. "Bishop, I say this with love. You are the worst liar I have ever worked with."

***

"Say it again," said Beaumont.

Nate stood in front of the desk with his hands at his sides. Eli had wisely excused himself to go and find a cup of coffee he didn't need. "The check cashing counter at the laundromat on Cuttler is collecting envelopes for someone. A man picks them up every second Friday. The owner's afraid of him. When I asked if she'd seen him at Jade Palace, she said she didn't know a Jade Palace, and her face said she did."

"Her face."

"Her face."

Beaumont regarded him without expression. It was very quiet in the office. Somewhere in the bullpen a phone rang and rang and was finally answered.

"You were told to stay off Marsh."

"I was. I did. This came to me. It's the break-in case, Captain. The laundromat is victim number three. I didn't pull a single record. I didn't drive by the diner. I asked the owner of a laundromat about her own laundromat." He drew a breath. "You told me if the man's name came up in another case, I was to come to you first. That's what I'm doing."

"It hasn't come up," said Beaumont. "A woman's *face* has come up."

"Yes, sir."

"A woman's face isn't a name."

"No, sir."

For a long moment Beaumont said nothing. Then he took his glasses off and rubbed the bridge of his nose, and when he looked up again he seemed a good deal older than he had a week ago. "Sit down, Bishop."

Nate sat.

"I don't like this," Beaumont said. "I want you to know that. I don't like that a laundromat that's been robbed is also being used as a pickup point, and I don't like that the thread runs through the one address I told you to leave alone. It's too convenient. It's the kind of thing that happens when someone wants you to keep pulling." He put the glasses on the desk. "But I also don't like being told by my own detective that he saw something and did nothing about it, because he was afraid of me. That's worse."

"I wasn't afraid of you."

"You were a little bit afraid of me. It's fine. It's healthy." Beaumont almost smiled. It didn't last. "Here is what happens. The laundromat is your case, and it stays your case. You'll write it up properly, every word, and it comes through me. You will not go near the diner. If a lead points at Marsh, you tell me, and I decide. And Bishop."

"Sir."

"You do not use your login. Not for Marsh, not for the laundromat, not for the notary. Not for anything. If I see your name in that log one more time before I've signed off, I won't be giving you a verbal warning. Understood?"

"Understood."

"Good." Beaumont picked up his pen, and put it down again. "The notary. Hollis and Crane."

"They lied to us."

"Of course they lied to you. Everybody lies to you. It's a police station." He looked at the card on his desk, cream stock, raised letters. "Get me a name. Not a login. A name. Ask around. Ask the people who know what a notary is supposed to do."

"Yes, sir."

"And Nate."

It was the first time he'd used the first name. Nate looked up.

"Whatever's pulling you," Beaumont said, more quietly. "It's dragged you a good distance in a month. Just make sure it isn't dragging you off a cliff."

***

Sage first noticed the man on Verdun Street at ten past four.

It wasn't anything. That was what she told herself. It was a boy in a rain jacket at the bus stop, nineteen or twenty, thin and pale, with the kind of hair that never lay flat, holding an old canvas satchel against his chest like a shield. He wasn't waiting for a bus. She knew that the way you know when a person isn't really eating. He was looking at the shop windows, one at a time, very carefully, the way a person looks at things when he's trying not to look at them.

She walked past. She went to the dry cleaner's and picked up her jacket, and stood at the counter for a minute waiting for the receipt. When she came out, the boy in the rain jacket was still there. Across the street now, at the bakery window, studying the rye.

*Coincidence.*

She went to Alder Street. She had an hour before her shift, and she'd promised herself a walk, and there was nothing strange about it. But at the corner of Alder and Cuttler she stopped to tie her shoe, and looked back out of the corner of her eye, and the boy in the rain jacket stopped, too. Half a block behind. He turned very quickly and bent to study a lamp post, and looked, for a moment, so stricken and so bad at it that she almost laughed.

Almost.

She had lived in Kesting Row for two years. She knew what a tail looked like. She had seen them on men in the alley behind Jade Palace, careful and patient and very dull. This wasn't that. This was a frightened kid who had been told to look at something and didn't know how to do it without being seen.

*Not for me.* The thought came up on its own, small and cold. *It can't be for me.*

But the pull moved in her chest, low and steady, and she thought of Olivia's face on the waterfront path, and a note in a coat pocket and a shape behind a car windshield and a woman's hands, warm and dry, holding hers. There were too many things in the drawer marked *later.* The drawer had stopped closing.

She turned the corner and stood flat against the brick wall of the pharmacy, out of sight, and counted. She got to eleven. The boy in the rain jacket came round the corner at a fast walk with his head down and his hand on the strap of his satchel, and nearly walked into her.

"Sorry!" he said, and flinched. "I'm so sorry, I didn't..."

He stopped. He looked at her. And something happened to his face.

It was small. It was almost nothing. His eyes went wide and unfocused, as though he'd caught a smell from another room, and his breath stopped. Not fear. Something more like awe. Then he blinked and it was gone, and he was only a pale, startled young man with his mouth slightly open, staring at a fifteen-year-old girl in a hoodie.

"Are you following me?" Sage said.

"No!" It came out much too fast. "God, no. I'm not following anyone. I'm on my lunch."

"It's four o'clock."

"It's a late lunch."

She looked at him. He looked at her. And she felt, absurdly, sorry for him, the way you'd feel sorry for a bird that had hit a window. He was trembling.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay?"

"Okay. Have a nice lunch."

She walked away. She made herself walk slowly, one step at a time, hands in her pockets, and she did not look back until she reached the door of Jade Palace. When she did, the boy in the rain jacket was gone.

It didn't help. It felt worse.

***

That night she closed the curtain on the balcony door.

She had never done it before. In two years, in the whole of her time in Millhaven, she'd left the glass bare, because there was nothing to see, and because it seemed like a small courtesy to the stars. Tonight she drew it across with a rattle of rings, and stood looking at the closed cloth in the light of the single lamp.

Comma watched her from the arm of the couch, unimpressed.

"It's just nerves," Sage told the cat.

Comma yawned.

Her phone buzzed on the counter. She picked it up.

*Mom says the offer stands for Monday. No pressure. Just, you know. A chair.* A pause, three dots, then another message. *I made her promise not to hug you. She said she'd do her best.*

Sage read it twice. She could feel the pull in her chest, and the cold place in her stomach where a boy in a rain jacket had put a small, exact finger. She thought of a warm green kitchen, and a table with a chair pulled out.

*I'll think about it,* she typed, and stopped. Deleted it. Typed, *Maybe.* Deleted that. She stood there a long time with the phone in her hand.

Something was coming. She knew it the way you know a storm by the way the air goes flat. She'd spent two years making sure she had nothing anyone could take from her, and here she was, in a small room with a new curtain, wanting a chair at a table more than she'd wanted anything in years.

That was the trouble. That was the whole trouble. You couldn't want a thing and be safe.

*Maybe,* she wrote, and sent it before she could take it back.

Then she turned off the lamp, and lay down in the dark with the cat at her feet and her hand flat over her heart, and did not sleep until almost dawn.